Announcing "Bearings" -- and two new songs out today!
Hi everyone! It's been a while, but I'm delighted to write to you today to report that I've got a brand new album coming out this fall, and that the first two songs available from it, “1922” and “The Museum of Everyday Life,” are out everywhere right now. (Click here to hear them.)
First, about the album at large: I'm happy to announce that "Bearings," my first full-length record since "The Trouble With Wilderness" came out a few years ago, will be released later this year. It's inspired by all my usual subject matter – twelve new songs about prairies, volcanoes, highways, buildings, fields, land surveys, and so on – but I went about the process of writing them a little bit differently this time. Instead of composing all the songs in advance, I went into the studio for each session knowing only the landscapes and concepts I wanted to write about, with no music written at all. This thrilling (if vaguely terrifying) new way of working forced me to write rapidly on the fly, moving around the piano to find the song in much the same way that we learn a landscape by wandering around and viewing it from different angles. It resulted in a slightly different type of music than I usually write – I think the songs on "Bearings" are a little quieter, and a bit more patterned and iterative, than my previous work – but this new process both felt like a liberating and helpful way to shake out new ideas without overthinking them and seemed a little more true to the experience of how we all establish a sense of the world's shape by actively moving through it. Whatever landscapes my songs are ever about, I have come to think they're always also about movement in some basic important way, and I like the ways in which this new album reflects that.
The album art for “Bearings,” which will be released this fall on CD, LP, and all digital platforms
To record the new album, I worked with the same people that helped me make "The Trouble With Wilderness": most of the basic tracking (which in this case also meant sweaty, frantic, on-the-fly composing) was completed with Kevin Harper at his studio in Nashville, and then I brought everything to Dimension Sound Studios in Boston, where Dan Cardinal and I built them out by adding various other instruments and effects to the piano tracks. Harris Paseltiner of the band Darlingside contributed cello to some songs and Paul Kinsman, my pal since high school, played a handful of wind instruments on another one. The majority of the songs are linked to collaborations, residencies, and other projects I did with NASA, Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, Lava Beds National Monument, National Parks Arts Foundation, the Volland Foundation and the Tallgrass Artist Residency, and I'm super grateful for the support of all those organizations. Dan also mixed and mastered the album, just as he did for "Wilderness," and folks, it sounds like a million bucks.
The cover art for "Bearings," seen above, is a piece called "every spot we're standing on was once in a different place" by the wonderful artist Katie Ione Craney, who lives and works in Alaska, and I'm very grateful to her for being so helpful and accommodating throughout the album's art/design phase. You can (and should!) view more of Katie's work at her website.
Now, the new singles! Again, the full record won't be out until this fall, but I plan to release several songs from it as singles between now and then. The first two, which again are called "1922" and "The Museum of Everyday Life," are out everywhere as of today, and you can stream them on the platform of your choice at this helpful link here or via the button below:
"1922" (listen here) is a reinterpretation of a fantastic song by Charlie Parr, a country blues musician from Duluth, Minnesota who is also a friend, role model, and one of my favorite musicians alive. His original song, "1922 Blues," is an all-time favorite of mine, and one of the first things I did at these improv sessions with Kevin last year was to take a spin with it, just to try and refamiliarize myself with the piano. It wound up being one of my favorite songs we recorded at that session.
The other tune, "The Museum of Everyday Life," (listen here) is named after one of the best places I know of; a little museum in a barn in northern Vermont that I’ve been obsessed with for a decade. The New York Times once perfectly described its mission as "chronicl[ing] and highlight[ing] the mundane, utilitarian, insignificant objects of our existence and mak[ing] them remarkable." That feels to me like important work and it’s exactly what I have always hoped for my music to do as well. (One fun feature of this song, for anyone interested in record production Easter eggs, is that it makes extensive and prominent use of a couch pillow as a percussion instrument.)
I'll be in touch to tell you all more about the album over the course of the next few months, as more and more songs from it make their way out into the world. In the meantime, I have several shows coming up around the northeastern US this summer! Please check them out here at my website – I hope I can see you at one of them. Finally: here's a beautiful new book by my friend Katy that I'm currently enjoying, and here's another by my friend Erica that knocked my socks off.
That's all for now! I'm so excited for you all to hear this new music, and hope that you'll give the two new songs a warm welcome by listening today. Thanks, as always, to all of you for all your support, and I hope I'll see you at a show this summer.
Talk soon,
Ben